How We Got Our App Featured on Product Hunt and How You Can Do it Too

They say you can’t properly promote your app without paid advertising. However, you sometimes come across app success stories telling about impressive numbers of organic downloads. And, interestingly enough, many of these stories include being featured on Product Hunt.

Product Hunt is a place for featuring and discussing best new apps, games, websites and tech. The community behind Product Hunt consists of early adopters, entrepreneurs and journalists. No wonder, appearing on Product Hunt can get your app good quality visibility.

Last week we got our photo editing app Ultrapop submitted on Product Hunt. Today I’ll tell you how you can get your app featured and illustrate each step with our own example.

What kind of apps can be featured?

Any good quality app that has been recently released or has just gone through a massive update has a chance to be featured.

And, game developers, super-important information for you! Product Hunt has recently opened a separate category, especially for games! It happened last week, the category is super fresh. Until not everyone in game development knows about this (and they all will, believe me) and moderators are not that swamped with pitch letters, you need to jump in, check out the games there, and try to get your game submitted.

Steps to get your app featured on Product Hunt

Submitting products to Product Hunt is not very straightforward. The people who can add new products are mostly either moderators or the makers of products already featured on Product Hunt. The more followers the submitting person has, the more people will get email notifications about the new product, and, probably, the more people will check out the product and upvote it. Product Hunt moderators are normally the ones with the most followers.

However, if you have a friend who has been invited to post products, don’t hesitate to ask them to submit your app. I looked through many products on Product Hunt, and some of the top ones were submitted by people with only a few followers. At the end of the day, it’s all about the quality of the product

So, let’s get started.

1) Sign up for Product Hunt using your Twitter account.

2) Get active: upvote the products you like, follow their makers, create a collection of products that are similar to yours and pay attention to who have submitted them, you may later ask these people to submit your product.

After the previous step, you’ll probably figure out who of the Product Hunt moderators post products similar to your app.

3) Get the tag line ready – a short sentence briefly explaining the essence of your product that you can send to a moderator together with your pitch.

4) Create a decent landing page. We did not, so the viewers were taken directly to the Ultrapop page on the App Store. This is not bad but doesn’t let you measure views of your product driven by Product Hunt.

5) Make up a draft of your first comment in which you tell why you decided to create the app and what your future plans are. I also used the comment to mention the app’s Instagram profile which brought us more than a hundred followers on that day.

6) Contact the moderator / maker. Make sure to do this when they are most likely to see the message – check their location using Twitter. Don’t panic if you can’t find the contact details of the people you’ve chosen. Try to reach them on Instagram, Quora or whichever social network you can find them in.

First I tried to reach top followed moderators on Product Hunt which didn’t work. But then I found Nichole Elizabeth @nikkielizdemere who often posted photo apps similar to ours. At first, I tried to contact her via PM on Instagram which wasn’t successful. And one day, I saw her mentioning her email address in one of her tweets and that’s how I reached her.

7) Don’t give up! The moderators will probably not post your product right away, even if they actually like it. Ultrapop was posted 5 days after I sent the letter to the moderator. So, don’t pitch all moderators at once. Sometimes you just need to wait.

Once the app is published:

1) Tweet @ProductHunt to ask for commenting ability.

2) Publish the first comment

3) Add your teammates.

4) Find a way to thank everyone who has upvoted your product(follow them on Product Hunt or/and Twitter, upvote their products, say thank you via Twitter)

5) Answer to comments

Why getting your app on Product Hunt rocks

The coolest thing about Product Hunt is that it attracts the most awesome people from the startup world: journalists, entrepreneurs, growth hackers, developers. As you start following Product Hunters on Twitter, you start to see how awesome your news feed gets and how many cool products you learn about every day. Product Hunters get genuinely interested in your product, ask challenging questions and can even suggest some features that will bring your product to a new level.

One more great thing. Being featured on Product Hunt is very prestigious. If you mention being featured on Product Hunt in your pitch to journalists, they will pay more attention to your letter. Also, Product Hunt is the place where many journalists hang out looking for new cool products to write posts about.

Ultrapop got into the daily top 10 on Product Hunt. The number of daily downloads which had been between 500-700 increased to almost 900. The profit from in-app purchases doubled on the day the app was published. We’ve got some nice comments and a few feature requests. Although, these are not the most impressive results getting on Product Hunt can provide, we are still quite happy with them.

To sum up, in order to get featured on Product Hunt, you need to

– Have an awesome product

– Find a person who a) has an ability to submit products on Product Hunt; b) is interested in new products in your niche

– Nail your landing page and tag line

– Actively participate in the discussions

Good luck!

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